Inventory Planner, Japan

Location: Yokohama, Japan

Report to: Operations Manager, Japan and Korea

Role Purpose:

• Overseeing and managing inventory levels to ensure optimal stock availability while minimizing excess or obsolete inventory.
• Focused on reducing customer backorders involves overseeing and executing strategies to optimize inventory levels and minimize backorders.

What you will be doing in this role:

Inventory Management:

• Analyzing historical sales data, demand forecasts, and inventory trends to develop market inventory replenishment plans. This includes identifying patterns and seasonality in demand, as well as monitoring inventory turnover rates and aging stock.
• Ensuring effective and timely replenishment takes place by maintaining optimal inventory levels. This involves setting appropriate reorder points, safety stock levels, and lead times based on demand forecasts and supplier lead times. Regularly reviewing and adjusting inventory parameters to align with changing demand patterns.
• Collaborating with Sales, Product Service Management (PSM), and Marketing to enhance demand forecasts. This may include analyzing market trends and incorporating input from commercial teams to predict future demand for products.
• Identifying opportunities to optimize inventory levels and reduce excess or obsolete inventory. This may involve implementing inventory reduction strategies such as stock redeployment, identifying products for fire sales, and managing inventory returns.
• Generating regular inventory reports and dashboards to track key performance indicators such as stock levels, aging stock levels, and inventory turnover. This includes analyzing inventory data to identify trends, outliers, and areas for improvement.
• Identifying opportunities for process improvement and implementing initiatives to streamline inventory management processes. This may involve automating inventory control tasks, adopting inventory management software, and collaborating across functions to optimize inventory processes.

Backorder Management:

• Monitoring backorder levels and prioritizing fulfillment to minimize customer impact. This involves identifying root causes of backorders, such as inventory shortages or production delays, and implementing corrective actions to address them.
• Prioritizing orders based on customer priority, order size, and delivery deadlines. Expedite critical orders to ensure timely fulfillment and communicate proactively with customers about any delays or backorders.
• Proactive stocking profile review based on customer historical demand trends.
• Proactive review the status of high value backorder number.
• Responsible to handle to the commercial / customer service enquiry related to the stock availability and stock status.
• Check the Best delivery date with suppliers.
• Accountable to drive continuous improvement project to define solution for backorder reduction and order availability (OA) performance.
• Coordinate inventory redeployment for back-order fulfilment.
• Responsible maintain planning policy.
• Steer the commercial team to reduce BED stock and collaborate with different function / process review to reduce the risk on BED Inventory.

How you make a difference in this role

You'll make a difference by ensuring optimal inventory levels that balance availability with efficiency, directly reducing customer backorders and improving service delivery. Through data-driven forecasting, cross-functional collaboration, and proactive inventory strategies, you help streamline operations and enhance customer satisfaction.

What experience we expect from you:

Essential Skills & Experience

• Proven experience in inventory management, supply chain planning, and order fulfilment.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to analyse complex data sets and make data-driven decisions.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills with the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and external partners.
• Demonstrated ability to prioritize tasks, manage multiple projects simultaneously, and meet tight deadlines in a fast-paced environment.
• Proficiency in inventory management software, ERP systems such as SAP.
• Good MS Office skills, especially advance skill in Microsoft Excel.
• Target oriented, self-motivated, could work under strong pressure.
• Ability to challenge status quo and drive for high performance.
• Ability to review processes for the purpose of developing and implementing plans for process changes in the support of continuous improvement initiatives.
• Business-level proficiency in English (reading, writing, and speaking)

Desirable Skills & Experience

• Prior experience in inventory expediting, customer service, or supply chain management is preferred.
• Knowledge of lean manufacturing principles, Six Sigma, or other continuous improvement methodologies is a plus.
• Experience of working in a global matrix organization.

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